Large-scale networked systems are commonplace platforms employed in a variety of settings for running applications and maintaining data for business and operational functions. For instance, a data center (e.g., physical cloud computing infrastructure) may provide a variety of services (e.g., web applications, email services, search engine services, etc.) for a plurality of customers simultaneously. These large-scale networked systems typically include a large number of resources distributed throughout the data center, in which each resource resembles a physical machine or a virtual machine (VM) running on a physical node or host. When the data center hosts multiple tenants (e.g., customer programs), these resources are optimally allocated from the same data center to the different tenants.
Often, multiple VMs will concurrently run on the same physical node within a computing network, or the data center. These VMs that share a common physical node may be allocated to the different tenants and may require different amounts of resources at a various times. For instance, there is typically only one network card installed to a physical node, where the network card has a limited amount of network bandwidth. When one tenant requires a high amount of resources to accomplish a particular task, one of the tenant's VMs running on the physical node can potentially stress the network card by sending a large amount of packets thereover, preventing other VMs running on the physical node from fairly sharing the resources thereof.
Accordingly, because optimal allocation of processing capabilities within a data center often involves placing a plurality of VMs on a single physical node, and because these VMs require resources (e.g., network bandwidth) to carry out most operations, a mechanism that allows the VMs on the same physical node to share the network bandwidth fairly, by placing restrictions on resource consumption, would help reduce stressing available resources and would help maintain a high quality of service provided to the tenants of the data center.